[Yoon Suin 2nd Edition] Aphid Man

The 2nd edition of Yoon-Suin will soon be upon us. Flee in terror before its 12 adventure sites, many extra appendices, plethora of random encounter tables (finally!), new maps (by Tom Fitzgerland) and entirely revamped art (by Matt Adams), and its new monsters, like this one:

Aphid Man

A race of humanoids with spongy green, yellow, black or red flesh and the ability to propagate explosively. They are unintelligent, uncultured, and uninterested in anything except eating and birthing; left to their own devices, they will impoverish vast regions with their insatiable appetites. 

HD 1-1, AC 8, #ATT 1, DMG 1d6 (bite), Move 120, ML 7, Save as F1, TT None 

*Green aphid-men can squirt sticky sap at a single attacker within 12', hitting automatically and slowing it for 2d6 rounds; yellow aphid-men produce a foul-smelling oil on their skin which stings the eyes, meaning melee attackers suffer a -2 penalty to ‘to hit’ rolls; black aphid-men can suicidally explode, spraying a noxious fluid over an area 6’ in diameter identical to a stinking cloud; red aphid-men excrete a waxy fluff on their skin which permanently coats non-magical hand weapons and renders them blunt and unusable on a successful hit (though that hit still does damage). 

Usually encountered in groups of 20-200. One female can produce a precise copy of herself at any given moment, once a month; that copy is born pregnant with another copy inside her, which can be birthed after a week. 

Ballet is as OSR as F*ck: More on the Appendix N of Appendix N

For familial reasons, I sometimes have to watch and pretend to be interested in ballet. Well, I say pretend to be interested; as time goes on, I have in fact become genuinely interested - and not just because I like watching attractive women prancing around in revealing clothes (although that is an added bonus). The level of skill, strength and prowess of professional ballet dancers is truly remarkable, and combined with the music of a genius like a Tchakovsky or a Stravinsky, the effect is often beyond words. Viz:

What is interesting about ballet is that it reveals another aspect of what I have previously called the Implied Appendix N, or indeed the Appendix N of Appendix N. The authors who inspired D&D did not come up with the pulp fantasy genre in a vacuum. They drew on an existing milieu of the fantastical which appeared throughout the history of Western art, going back of course to the dawn of time, but really coming to fruition in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Part of this, as I detailed in my earlier post, was the fiction of the likes of HG Wells, Jules Verne, RL Stevenson, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and H Rider Haggard. But it is also there in the tastes of the elite - opera and ballet.

Classical and romantic ballets, drawing as they often did on the fairy tales of Central and Eastern Europe, and existing books and stories, are filled with inspiration for the fantasy genre that we know today. There are princesses turned into swans by evil sorcerers (Swan Lake), human sacrifices to bring automata or golems to life (Coppelia), heroes stealing things from the lairs of immortal wizards (The Firebird), a woman being forced to dance herself to death in a sinister pagan ritual (The Rite of Spring), magical undead beings who can only be defeated in specific ways (The Miraculous Mandarin), violent, giant mice led by a mice king (The Nutcracker), evil hags performing mysterious charms and curses (La Sylphide) - not to mention evil fairies (Sleeping Beauty).

There is little in the world that is really sui generis - cultural artefacts always have precursors, and of course most of these ballets are not original in that they are based themselves on other works, myths and legends. I think there is a tendency among modern fantasy fans to tell themselves that the genre burst onto the scene with Tolkien, or perhaps earlier pulp writers. The truth, of course, is that all that is just topsoil and fantasy's roots go an awful lot deeper. 

Wednesday Lunchtime D&D Call to Arms

In these literal and figurative dark times, what we need is the light of Our Lady of Dungeons & Dragons to shine forth upon us. In that vein, I'd like to run a campaign of D&D online, Wednesday lunchtimes, 12-2pm UK time. It will be a weekly game, probably starting next week (the 20th) or, failing that, the week after. 

I would like to run a megadungeon inside a giant tree, which I am currently mapping and keying. 

If you are interested, contact me at noismsgames AT protonmail.com. You get special priority if you were in my Cruth Lowlands game from days of yore (you know who you are; I've lost everybody's email addresses). 

Megadungeons on A1 Scrolls

Yesterday, I discovered that my stationery cupboard at work has a huge stash of A1 notepads. Of course, work stationery exists only to be pilfered, so I will help myself to one sooner or later, but a great idea (great to me, at any rate) popped into my head as well the moment I saw them: megadungeons on A1 scrolls.

I have experimented in the past with mapping dungeons on A3 paper because it allows you to easily include both map and key on the same page (the latter either situated in a box in a corner or as notes within/next to rooms), with space to breathe, cutting out the need to flip between pages or files. How much truer would this be of A1 paper? Especially if the whole thing (or at least an entire, sprawling level) could be made to fit on one sheet. If so, it would be a simple matter to carry round a megadungeon rolled up in a tube, whether as one sheet or several. Pop a sheet of house rules in with them, and you're ready to go. The advantage of the scroll is also that one does not need to unwind the whole thing - just the cross section where the action is happening. 

I would much prefer to run a dungeon from a scroll than from a book, if only for the vibe, man.

The Forgotten Hobbit

I went with the family to visit my aged mother over Christmas. Having finished all the books I'd brought with me earlier than I expected, I was at a loss for bed-time reading, so I rooted through the shelves and discovered this old 1970s edition of The Hobbit:

You have to love that old school cover.

I probably last read The Hobbit about 7 or 8 years ago - enough time to forget lots of little details. As these came back to me, it gave me cause to reflect on the evolution of the fantasy genre; a lot of Tolkien's ideas have been picked up and run away with during the course of the last 50-70 years, but there are a number which simply haven't. Indeed, as you read The Hobbit now, you encounter many little throwaway lines that have had almost no impact on the development of the fantasy genre and which, if they had, may have altered its flavour considerably. For example:

Wicked dwarves allied with goblins. For some reason dwarves being the enemies of orcs and goblins has become a trope, but here on p. 58 of my edition we find: "[Goblins] did not hate dwarves especially, no more than they hated everyone and everything, and particularly the orderly and prosperous; in some parts wicked dwarves had even made alliances with them." Although there are shades of Warhammer chaos dwarves and their alliance with hobgoblins, here.

Weapons which gain power when a particular foe is around. We're used to depictions of elvish weapons glowing to reveal the presence of orcs, and we're also used to weapons which eat souls or gain power from shedding blood, or whatever. But Glamdring gets sharper just because goblins are nearby. From p. 60 - "It burned with a rage that made it gleam if goblins were about; now it was bright as blue flame for delight in the killing of the great lord of the cave. It made no trouble whatever of cutting through the goblin-chains and setting all the prisoners free as quickly as possible."

Gollum wears trousers. Okay, so not exactly a trope, but I think everybody now has the image of Peter Jackson's Gollum in their heads when they now imagine the character. But he originally had pockets, and thus surely trousers. From p. 73 - "[Gollum] thought of all the things he kept in his own pockets: fish-bones, goblins' teeth, wet shells, a bit of bat-wing..."

Giants. Even Tolkien himself seemed to forget that there were giants in Middle Earth once - they don't appear in The Lord of the Rings or The Silmarillion unless I am horribly mistaken. But they're there in The Hobbit. On p. 88 - "'I must see if I can't find a more or less decent giant to block it up again,' said Gandalf [referring to a mountain pass through which goblins are coming], 'or soon there will be no getting over the mountains at all.'" They appear to be good giants as well. 

Animal Fantasy. On p. 115 - "Inside the hall it was now quite dark. Beorn clapped his hands, and in trotted four beautiful white ponies and several large long-bodied grey dogs. Beorn said something to them in a queer language like animal noises turned into talk. They went out again and soon came back carrying torches in their mouths, which they lit at the fire and stuck in low brackets on the pillars of the hall around the central hearth. The dogs could stand on their hind legs when they wished, and carry things with their fore-feet." Later there are sheep serving dinner and ponies helping set the table.

Talking giant spiders. We're all used to giant spiders, but Tolkien's talk. Not for him the boring concept of 'Animal (1)' intelligence.  On p. 145 - "[T]hen in the silence and stillness of the wood he realised that these loathsome creatures were speaking one to another. Their voices were a sort of thin creaking and hissing, but he could make out many of the words that they said. They were talking about the dwarves! 'It was a sharp struggle, but worth it,' said one. 'What nasty thick skins they have to be sure, but I'll wager there is good juice inside.'

Elves who like a piss-up. On p. 164 - "Then Bilbo heard the king's butler bidding the chief of the guards good night. 'Now come with me,' he said, 'and taste the new wine that has just come in. I shall be hard at work tonight clearing the cellars of the empty wood, so let us have a drink first to help the labour.'" They end up getting shitfaced and blacking out. These are not your father's elves, are they?

The tone of The Hobbit is different because it's for children, of course, but also because Tolkien's ideas clearly developed a lot in between its publication and writing The Fellowship of the Ring. Who knows what would have emerged if The Lord of the Rings had never been written and The Hobbit had remained the genre's ur-text? 

An Old Friend for a New Year

This year, I intend to do some real work on the Fixed World. Probably released via a Patreon (or similar) model, with each release being a segment of the map, pre-written content, and tables for generating more - enough so that you could easily run an entire campaign with the material provided in each one.

Here is a work in progress world map, at a 50-mile per hex scale. Not finished, because as if the whole idea wasn't absurdly ambitious enough, I want ultimately to try to detail the seas and oceans as well. I also need to fiddle around with the position of things and add pack ice and so on - and, more importantly, the 'time zones'.